Another one to add to the endless list of basic design flaws in Mac OS X’s Finder in its current incarnation…

In recent versions of iTunes, as far as I can tell, you don’t even have the option to prevent the software from looking up track name information in GraceNote’s CDDB database anymore—which makes the “Get CD Track Names” command in the “Advanced” menu utterly irrelevant. (As soon as you insert an audio CD with iTunes running on your machine, iTunes gets the CD track names for you, whether you like it or not.)

That’s bad enough as it is. But what about the consequence of this behaviour in the Finder? If the audio CD that you’ve inserted happens to have a very long title in the CDDB, here’s what happens to the Finder’s Sidebar in your Finder windows:

How on earth is having such an oversized Sidebar useful? The long title has to be truncated in most contexts anyway (and is indeed truncated even here, because even the oversized Sidebar is not big enough to display it in full).

I really have no idea what the purpose of this behaviour is. All I know is that it’s a pain in the neck.

But it’s not only CDs with this problem. Disk Images cause the same mess. Personally I loathe the fact that the sidebar’s width changes automatically at all. I keep my sidebar, or rather, would like to keep my sidebar if the friggin’ Finder didn’t change its width all the time at a minimal icon only width. That’s enough for me, doesn’t waste that much screen space and doesn’t destroy my carefully set-up icon views…

But, alas, the sidebar’s width constantly changes when mounting and unmounting things and the Finder’s brokenness just is a royal pain as ever…